


To Die In His Arms

by maybegracie



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Illness, M/M, Mad Cow Disease
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 03:24:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybegracie/pseuds/maybegracie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry had always been different, but falling in love with someone in his mind wasn’t exactly his plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Die In His Arms

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the amazing book: Going Bovine. If you haven't read it, read it now.

I remember the day they told me. I was sitting in the hospital bed, picking at a hang nail, my mother typing out a message on her phone in the uncomfortable plastic chair beside my bed. My mother was always on her phone, apparently even her son having a seizure and going to the hospital wasn’t enough to stop her from checking to see who’s husband had left who.

The doctor came in the room, and my mother put down her phone and looked at him. I was jealous. My mother never put down her phone for me. She merely glanced up, or held up a finger, then went back to her phone and forgot about me standing there with my report card, or a permission slip for a field trip to Washington D.C.

“Well, it’s not good news,” was the first thing my doctor said. I can’t remember his name. Maybe it was Dave, or Daniel, I can’t remember. But I can remember the look on his face when he looked at me. He pitied me. I could tell. At the time, I was furious at him for acting like I was a baby, like anyone cared that I was sick. When in reality, I didn’t cry. The day my father died was the last time I cried. And then I was thirteen.

“What is it?” my mother asked. I glanced at her, only to see her face blank, emotionless. Like mine. Never caring, never getting too involved in anything or anyone.

“It’s called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, and it’s fatal.”

My mother looked down at her phone when it buzzed, but she didn’t slide it open to read the message. “How long?”

“About five months, six if he’s lucky,” the doctor said, not looking at me. That made me angry. I wasn’t four. I knew what Mad Cow was, and I knew I wouldn’t be lucky. I wasn’t a lucky person.

-  
It was two weeks later that I started ‘acting up’, as my mother preferred to call it. It happened in P.E.

I was jogging around the gym, along with the twenty-six other kids in my class, when I froze. I could tell I was in trouble. Everyone kept running, a few people giving me confused looks. No one knew about it yet, I was still just that strange Harry Styles that sat by himself at lunch and liked boys.

No one else could hear it, but I could. It was a boy, humming as he walked along leisurely among the sweaty teenagers. He had messy hair and red pants, and he was humming some old song my mom liked before dad died. Now she didn’t listen to music.

I shook my head and kept walking, expecting him to disappear. I knew it was a side affect, but I thought it happened later.

The boy didn’t disappear, instead he began skipping. I let out a short bark of laughter, and a girl named Lucy who was running close to me jumped in surprise. He looked at me funny and I shrugged. I was going crazy anyway, no need to deny it. The boy was spinning when I looked back at him. As I got closer, I noticed he had tanned skin and gorgeous blue eyes. I couldn’t help but think that he was quite possibly the most attractive person I had ever seen in my life.

Then he stopped moving, faced me, grinned, and disappeared. I blinked. Normal people don’t disappear.

I tried to forget about the boy, but I couldn’t.

-

The next time he showed up I was sitting in my room. Then I heard a soft voice singing, and looked over to see the boy sitting on the floor beside my bed and strumming a guitar. He was wearing the same clothes, but he was barefoot this time.

“Who are you?” I asked, causing him to look up in surprise.

“I don’t know. You tell me.” He had a lovely voice, but his comment left me conflicted. How was I supposed to know who he was.

“You’re Louis,” I finally guessed.

“Alright,” he said back, looking back down at the instrument and strumming the strings, singing the old song again.

Louis was a little older than me, but I didn’t mind. He didn’t talk for the rest of the day, and when I looked over about two hours later, he was gone.

-

The next day he showed up again. I didn’t feel good so my mother let me stay home. I probably would have stayed home anyways, even if she had said no, because I was sick, and I could do whatever the fuck I wanted.

When Louis showed up, I merely nodded my greeting and turned back to the TV. He sat down on the couch next to me. I shivered at his close proximity, but I told myself it was a symptom. I had never acted like this around anyone, especially imaginary people.

When the program was over, I turned the TV off and turned, pleasantly surprised to see that Louis hadn’t gone…. somewhere, but was staring intently at the wall, as if it held the secrets of the universe. Hell, maybe it did and I just couldn’t see it.

“Who are you?” I asked, pulling my legs up and crossing them.

“I thought you said I was Louis,” he mused, looking at the wall still.

“Yeah, but where do you go when you leave, and why are you here?”

“I suppose I’m here because you need me, and well, when I leave, it’s just… blackness. Blackness until I wake up here again. With you. And then I remember who I am, and who you are, and the blackness hides for a while, until you forget to need me,” he shrugs. I nod, studying his face.

“I’m sick,” I say.

“Alright,” he says.

Then he turns and looks at me. I look back, and he leans in, and I close my eyes, and wait. But when I open them a few minutes later, the couch next to me is empty, and I wished that I hadn’t stopped needing Louis anymore, because I was awfully lonely, and it didn’t matter that he wasn’t real.

-

When I tried to tell my mom about Louis, it went something like this:

Me: Hey mom  
Mom: Hey Harry  
Me: I made a friend  
Her: No use making friends, Harry you’re sick and you’re gonna stay sick until you die.  
Me: I know. He knows.  
Her: He got a name?  
Me: Louis.  
Her: Where’d you meet him?  
Me: I made him up.  
Her: You’re not going to go all bat shit crazy on me now are you? Just ‘cause you’re sick doesn’t mean you can go bat shit crazy.  
Me: Who say’s I’m crazy. Maybe I’m sane, and everyone else is crazy. Maybe Louis is real and you all are bat shit crazy for not seeing him.

My mother pondered this.

Her: I’m not crazy, I’m you’re mother. Now go away.

So I did.

-

The day the kids in my school found out I had Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease was the day I quit school, with my mother’s excuse of: “He’s dying. He doesn’t need school, he’ll never do anything with it anyways. What’s the point?”

I got a lot of emails that night from the boys saying they were sorry about me being sick, and the girls claiming that they had sobbed when they found out. How they had always thought I was an alright guy and how I didn’t deserve to die.

I laughed when I read them, I laughed so hard that I threw up, and my mom grimaced at the sight of the puke on the floor, mumbling for me to clean it up.

Apparently having a fatal illness doesn’t get you out of chores.

-

Louis kept coming, more and more frequently, always with the excuse of my needing him. He was the only one who didn’t treat me differently because of my disease, mostly because if it weren’t for the disease, he wouldn’t be here.

One particular Tuesday, we were lying in my bed, my head on his shoulder, when he asked me something.

“Have you ever kissed a boy?”

I shook my head, and he sat up, turning to me.

“Do you want to?”

I nodded, and he grinned before leaning in slowly. I kept my eyes open. I didn’t want him to run into the blackness again, so I kept them open so I could see if it came to get him.

When are lips met, my lids fluttered closed, and I was sure that the darkness wasn’t coming. Because kissing Louis, all I could see was white. Bright white light, flooding my body and making me gasp for breath, because I was scared that I would drown. But Louis pulled me out of the white light, and we looked at each other, our lips still pressed against one another, and Louis smiled at me. And I smiled at him.

-

Two months before the estimated expiration date, I forgot my mother. I wasn’t sad, I couldn’t remember her. One minute she was bitching about work, and the next she wasn’t my mom. She was a lady in my house who looked like me. Before, I would have given anything to forget my mom, but when it happened, I couldn’t be happy. I couldn’t even remember a reason to be happy.

When Louis showed up again, I remembered him. I told him about the lady in my house and how she thought she was my mother and he laughed, and called her crazy. I don’t know if he knew she was my mother and was being polite, but either way, we laughed and laughed until I started shaking. And I couldn’t stop. But Louis lay his hand on my shoulder, and the light filled me again and I smiled, and he smiled, and we smiled, and he told me that ‘when I died he could be with me forever.’ That was the first time I wanted to die.

-

The doctor told me that I would die easily. That I would just slip into the nothingness. But I knew that he was lying. I think that secretly, the doctor could see Louis too. I think he knew he was there.

I told him about Louis a lot. I told him how when he smiled, his eyes crinkled at the corner, and he would say ‘that’s great Harry, but he’s not real’. And I would laugh, I would laugh because Louis was the only real thing anymore, and the hospital wasn’t real, and even the doctor wasn’t real. All that was real was Louis and the blackness and the white light.

The lady who thought she was my mother and the doctor said that I was getting worse. They said that my mood swings were coming more frequently. I didn’t have mood swings. They were crazy. I was only sad when Louis wasn’t gone.

When I told Louis this, he got upset, and started coming more often. He would sleep with me in my bed, and we would kiss and look at each other and be in the white light together and laugh about all the crazy people who thought they knew me. Louis knew me, and we were the only real people, it seemed like. Everyone else were just pretend people, and Louis and I were real.

-

Sometimes I would ask Louis: “When will I die?”

And he would say: “Not yet, Harry. You’re not ready to die just yet. Wait.”

And I waited.

-

The day I stopped waiting was August 17th. It was sunny, ironically, and I was laying in the hospital bed when Louis came. He had a box, and I asked him what it was.

“It’s where the light comes from,” he said, and I grinned and clapped my hands.

“It’s time to come with me, Harry.”

He handed me the box and I wasted no time in opening it, but what greeted me wasn’t the light, but the darkness.

I clawed at the box, looking for some secret place where the light was. I looked at Louis, my heart pounding, and he had tears dripping down his face.

“It’s not my fault,” he whimpered. “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.”

-

They say that Harry Styles died on August 17th, 1997 at approximately 12:34. He was found three minutes later, with tears running down his face, clutching a small black box. He died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease.

He was eighteen when he died, and his school made a memorial for him in the hallway, filled with pictures of him before his untimely death, of him smiling at thin air.

Doctor David Snow, a specialist in his condition, couldn’t find any evidence as to why he had died at that time. His body didn’t show any struggle, and they couldn’t see any signs of a suicide.

A few weeks later Ms. Styles, Harry’s mother, found a notebook under Harry’s bed. It was filled with notes and drawings and diary entries about a boy named Louis. About a light and a blackness, and about waiting to die to be with him.

After a year of research, Ms. Styles found a match to Harry’s ramblings. Louis Tomlinson, a twenty year old boy, who had died about a year before Harry, from cancer. He fit the description perfectly, right down to the red pants and blue eyes.

Ms. Styles contacted his mother, a single woman named Jay Tomlinson, and they quickly boned over their lost children.

They never found out why Harry would know all these things about Louis, but they thrived on the idea that maybe Louis and Harry were together somewhere, happy. Living, or rather, not living, a new life.

Fourteen years after Harry’s death, the mothers still cannot find any evidence as to why Harry and Louis were connected, and what had happened to Harry, but they live with the hope that they will find out one day, and finally solve the mystery of their sons unique and twisted relationship.


End file.
